Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882).djvu/26

 18 INTRODUCTION.

higher euloginm can be pronounced than that Longfellow says of the Village Blacksmith »— “Something attempted, something done, Has earned a night's repose.”

Douglass found his people enslaved and oppressed. He has given the best years of his life to the improvement of their condition, and, now that he looks back upon his labors, may he not say he has “attempted” and “done” something? and may he not claim the “repose” which ought to come in the evening of a well spent life?

The first twenty-three years of Douglass’ life were twenty- three years of slavery, obscurity, and degradation, yet doubt- less in time to come these years will be regarded by the student of history the most interesting portion of his life; to those who in the future would know the inside history of American slavery, this part of his life will be specially in- structive. Plantation life at Tuckahoe as related by him is not fiction, it is fact; it is not the historian’s dissertation on slavery, it is slavery itself, the slave’s life, acts, and thoughts, and the life, acts, and thoughts of those around him. It is Macauley (I think) who says that a copy of a daily newspaper [if there were such] published at Rome would give more in- formation and be of more value than any history we have. So, too, this photographic view of slave life as given to us in the autobiography of an ex-slave will give to the reader a clearer insight of the system of slavery than can be gained from the examination of general history.

Col. Lloyd’s plantation, where Douglass belonged, was very much like other plantations of the south. Here was the great house and the cabins, the old Aunties and patriarchal Uncles, little picanninies and picanninies not so little, of every shade of complexion, from ebony black to whiteness of the master race; mules, overseers, and broken down,fences. Here was the negro Doctor learned in the science of roots and herbs; also the black conjurer with his divination. Here was slave- breeding and slave-selling, whipping, torturing, and beating to